Executive Control

We also conduct traditional cognitive neuroscience research on the executive control of behavior, with an emphasis on the prefrontal cortex (PFC). These studies use tasks derived from cognitive psychology — often involving response selection, behavioral conflict, or memory — and seek to elucidate the functional properties of specific regions within PFC by converging evidence across multiple studies. This work often connects to our lab’s interest in neuroeconomics. For example, we have used sets of different decision making tasks to map out a functional topography within medial prefrontal cortex. We have also investigated parallels between executive control processes (e.g., emotion regulation) and decision making processes (e.g., valuation). In recent years, we have explored techniques of meta-analysis that provide insight about large-scale regularities in the cognitive neuroscience literature.